30 Facts About John-Roger Hinkins

John-Roger Hinkins was brought up in the Mormon faith, As a youth, he attended the local LDS church's Young Men's Mutual Improvement Association and occasionally gave inspirational "three-minute talks".

John-Roger Hinkins described his childhood as "typical", distinguished only by an early belief that he could spot auras, colorful fields that some people believe surround the human body.

John-Roger Hinkins then moved to San Francisco to work as an insurance claims adjuster.

John-Roger Hinkins received a Secondary Life Teaching Credential from the State of California, and performed post-graduate work at University of California, Los Angeles, University of Southern California and California State University, Los Angeles.

John-Roger Hinkins then began teaching English at Rosemead High School in a suburb of Los Angeles.

John-Roger Hinkins relates having had a near-death experience while undergoing surgery for a kidney stone in late 1963, after which he fell into a nine-day coma.

John-Roger Hinkins began to refer to himself as "John-Roger" in recognition of this transformation.

In 1968, five years after his coma, John-Roger Hinkins began to hold seminars as an independent spiritual teacher in homes of friends in Santa Barbara and Thousand Oaks.

The demand for his seminars grew, until in 1971, John-Roger Hinkins resigned from his job as a high school English teacher and formally incorporated the Church of the Movement of Spiritual Inner Awareness.

John-Roger Hinkins received his doctorate in Spiritual Science from this organization, and was its president.

In 1978 John-Roger Hinkins created the Insight organization with friend and fellow MSIA Minister Russell Bishop.

In 1979, John-Roger Hinkins founded the Heartfelt Foundation, a volunteer-driven, 501 non-profit organization dedicated to serving and assisting people in any form of need.

In 1982, John-Roger Hinkins founded the Institute for Individual and World Peace, a volunteer-driven 501 non-profit organization dedicated to studying, identifying, and presenting the processes that lead to peace.

John-Roger Hinkins is the author of over 55 books, including The Rest of Your Life, Timeless Wisdoms.

John-Roger Hinkins has given more than 6000 seminars over the last forty years, most of which have been recorded either in audio or video format by NOW Productions.

John-Roger Hinkins produced his own national cable TV show, That Which Is.

Dissidents in the organization say John-Roger Hinkins employed covert listening devices at MSIA's Santa Monica headquarters to support his claim of possessing extrasensory perception.

John-Roger Hinkins later discovered that the microphones all fed into a switch arrangement in John-Roger's personal office, and learned they had been installed by members of John-Roger's personal staff.

Insight facilitators reported that John-Roger Hinkins monitored Insight training seminars via remote controlled video cameras connected to his private office.

The Whitmores claim that MSIA members had been led to believe that John-Roger Hinkins had taken a vow of celibacy, and therefore did not question the series of attractive young men that stayed in his house.

John-Roger Hinkins's home was ransacked and a number of his research files were stolen.

One of the main allegers, religion academic David C Lane, has published evidence that Hinkins took without attribution key spiritual teachings from Twitchell, who, Lane further claims, took them in turn from Radha Soami Satsang Beas, a movement with which Lane was at the time actively involved.

John-Roger Hinkins, himself, admits that he had some level of involvement with the group: around the time of his surgery and religious experience, he had been exploring a variety of different spiritual teachings, and these explorations included Eckankar.

Religion scholar James R Lewis, in his book on Hinkins and MSIA, quotes a conversation in which Hinkins acknowledges that he studied with Eckankar, had a private interview with Twitchell, and received information from the group stating that he was an initiate, but denies being formally initiated into the group.

Nonetheless, side-by-side text comparisons of materials published by Lane appear to clearly show that John-Roger Hinkins copied nearly verbatim, Twitchell's idiosyncratic cosmology in his own 1976 publication The Sound Current.

John-Roger Hinkins appears to have clearly plagiarized in his work Affirmations from Florence Scovel Shinn's book, The Game of Life and How to Play It.

In 1994, Peter McWilliams, a former high-level member of MSIA, published Life 102: What to Do When Your Guru Sues You, which charged that John-Roger Hinkins had repeatedly abused his power as a guru.

Ultimately, McWilliams agreed to abandon the copyright to Life 102: What to Do When Your Guru Sues You to John-Roger Hinkins to settle the suit.

Shortly after the publicized scandals that rocked MSIA during 1988 John-Roger Hinkins announced that he had passed the "keys" to the Mystical Traveler Consciousness to protege John Morton.

John-Roger Hinkins continued to participate in MSIA and PTS annual events until his death at the age of 80, on October 22,2014, at his home in Los Angeles, California, from pneumonia.